About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Publication
Statistics and Probability Letters
Paper
On the simulation size and the convergence of the Monte Carlo EM algorithm via likelihood-based distances
Abstract
When the conditional expectation of a complete-data likelihood in an EM algorithm is analytically intractable, Monte Carlo integration is often used to approximate the E-step. While the resulting Monte Carlo EM algorithm (MCEM) is flexible, assessing convergence of the algorithm is a more difficult task than the original EM algorithm, because of the uncertainty involved in the Monte Carlo approximation. In this note, we propose a convergence criterion using a likelihood-based distance. Because the likelihood is approximated by Monte Carlo integration, we make the distance small with a large probability by selecting the Monte Carlo sample size adaptively at each step of the MCEM algorithm. We implement the proposed convergence criterion along with the simulation size selection in a one-way random effects model. The result shows that our MCEM iterations match the exact EM iterations closely. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.